Daily Archives: March 3, 2019

This month, we released several new capabilities to help you stay ahead of threats, create a more productive workplace, and keep you in the flow of work.

Here’s a look at what’s new in February.

Stay ahead of threats and collaborate securely

New features and services help you better manage a complex threat landscape and communicate and collaborate securely.

Extend your security team’s capability with Microsoft Threat Experts—Our new managed threat-hunting service, called Microsoft Threat Experts, helps you proactively hunt and prioritize threats to get the most out of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). The service provides access to world-class experts who can help you work through tough investigation challenges with the new Ask a Threat Expert button. Go to your Windows Defender ATP settings to apply for the public preview.

Empower healthcare professionals to securely communicate and collaborate—This month, we announcednew capabilities in Microsoft Teams that enable secure messaging and collaboration workflows for healthcare organizations. Priority notifications enable clinicians to focus on urgent messages to manage patient care. In addition, the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams enables clinicians to securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and even start a video meeting—all in one hub for teamwork. These capabilities are now in private preview; visit the Microsoft 365 and health page and partner site to learn more about how Teams and Microsoft 365 can empower your healthcare teams.

Move confidently to the modern desktop and cloud with Desktop App Assureand Microsoft FastTrack—Our new service from Microsoft FastTrack, Desktop App Assure, provides app compatibility services for Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus. FastTrack also now offers guidance on how to configure Exchange Online Protection, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Message Encryption, and Data Loss Prevention policies. These services are now globally available to eligible customers with more than 150 seats at no additional cost. Sign in to Microsoft FastTrack and complete a Request for Assistance form to get started.

Get security alerts for your Microsoft account on your phone—Receive security notifications for important events on your personal Microsoft account now via the Microsoft Authenticator app. When you receive a push notification, you can quickly view your account activity and take actions to protect your account if needed. Microsoft Authenticator can also be used to add two-step verification to your account for added security. To get started, download the Microsoft Authenticator app and add your personal account.

Manage tasks and capture data with ease

New features expand capabilities to easily access all your apps and files, capture and convert data, and add context to your tasks.

Jump into your work quickly with the new Office app for Windows 10—The new, free Office app provides a simple experience to get started with and get the most out of Office. Anyone who signs in with a work, school, or personal Microsoft Account can use it to quickly access all the apps available to them and their most relevant files and documents. Organizations can also take advantage of the ability to integrate third-party apps, enable users to search for documents and people across the organization, and customize the experience with their own branding. The Office app can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store, requires a current version of Windows 10, and works with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, and Office.

Add data to Excel directly from a photo—Using the Excel app, you can take a picture of a printed data table on your Android device and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This new image recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter hardcopy data. This capability is starting to roll out for the Excel Android app with iOS support coming soon.

Quickly add photos and files to tasks inMicrosoft To-Do—Attach files and photos to help make tasks more actionable with added context. This highly requested feature is now available on all platforms and syncs across your devices, so you can take your new file-attached tasks on the go.

Other updates

New one-time passcodes (OTP) from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) make sharing and collaboration seamless for any user with any account.

Azure AD now supports automated user provisioning from Workday, enabling fast and efficient identity creation, so employees can access their Microsoft 365 apps and all other critical resources on day one.

Starting this month, the Teams desktop app will be installed along with the rest of the Office 365 ProPlus apps for all new installs.

Updates to the SharePoint Migration Tool make it even easier to bring your information to the cloud, with improvements like the ability to migrate web parts, pages, and site navigation.

Istio security features typically appeal to IT pros who’ve already adopted Kubernetes container orchestration, but a desire for service mesh security pushed one online retail enterprise to adopt containers as a secondary strategy.

Auto Trader UK, the firm that runs the U.K.’s largest online automotive marketplace, was already a mature DevOps and virtualization shop in early 2018 when a potential customer’s request for proposal called for data encryption at rest and in flight. Auto Trader developers deployed application updates multiple times per day to a virtualized private cloud that ran on VMware’s vSphere hypervisor and CloudStack infrastructure automation.

Auto Trader engineers spent months trying to write a sidecar proxy attached to a MongoDB back end for service discovery, but automated end-to-end data encryption proved to be too tough a nut for the company to crack on its own.

“It had taken us months trying to do it using our on-premises virtualization technologies,” said Russell Warman, head of infrastructure and operations at Auto Trader. “One of my colleagues suggested that we could do it quicker using GKE and Istio, and within two weeks he managed to prove that out.”

Istio security prompts container migration

Auto Trader now has 163 applications in production on GKE and plans to migrate its main website to the cloud infrastructure in the first half of 2019. Auto Trader also considered Amazon’s Kubernetes service, but preferred Google because it created Kubernetes and co-created Istio, and because GKE and Istio were available in European regions close to Auto Trader’s headquarters at the time.

“Containers were almost a byproduct of using Istio,” Warman said. “But using them together has given us a load more benefits than if we’d just gone to containers — we wouldn’t have gotten the mutual TLS and end-to-end encryption, [and] we wouldn’t have gotten the visibility and service discovery Istio gives us.”

Istio security with mutual TLS (Transport Layer Security) and granular encryption has been much easier to set up and operate on GKE than the company’s early attempts with VM-based tech.

“Encryption can be done transparently by Istio, so applications are completely unaware and require no changes to implement it,” Warman said. “[GKE has also] improved our security posture because when we deploy, we check it against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, and using security groups to make sure applications can access only the things they need.”

Istio visibility outweighs ops learning curve

Containers enable Auto Trader to provision infrastructure more efficiently, and its DevOps team to increase the number of daily deployments, Warman said. In 2011, at the start of Auto Trader’s shift to DevOps, it deployed 900 times in the course of a year; in 2015, with the on-premises infrastructure, 2,487 times; and in 2018, it made 11,031 deployments.

Containers were almost a byproduct of using Istio, but using them together has given us a load more benefits than if we’d just gone to containers.Russell Warmanhead of infrastructure and operations, Auto Trader UK

“With containers and Istio, we can deploy smaller changes more frequently, which reduces business risk and means our success rate with deployments is better,” Warman said.

GKE, Kubernetes and Istio security took some getting used to among the company’s operations staff. A pair of ops experts received in-depth training in 2018 and then trained their colleagues, but Auto Trader ran into issues with configuring clusters for upgrades, and struggled to provision enough capacity to perform the Kubernetes upgrade process.

Still, these bumps in the road pale in comparison to the months of attempts to stand up service mesh-based encryption on premises, Warman said. The move to GKE has also eased IT infrastructure monitoring for ops teams because of Istio’s granular telemetry features and data collection through Prometheus.

“Our product teams really love that they only have to put in a couple of labels and they get really great visibility into what their application is doing,” he said.

Active Member

I’m hunting for one for my other half and her photography business. Unlikely people will be moving these on just yet but thought I’d see.

Cheers

Location: Thame | Oxfordshire

______________________________________________________This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads.By replying to this thread you agree to abide by the trading rules detailed here.Please be advised, all buyers and sellers should satisfy themselves that the other party is genuine by providing the following via private conversation to each other after negotiations are complete and prior to dispatching goods and making payment:

Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too

Name and address including postcode

Valid e-mail address

DO NOT proceed with a deal until you are completely satisfied with all details being correct. It’s in your best interest to check out these details yourself.

This month, we released several new capabilities to help you stay ahead of threats, create a more productive workplace, and keep you in the flow of work.

Here’s a look at what’s new in February.

Stay ahead of threats and collaborate securely

New features and services help you better manage a complex threat landscape and communicate and collaborate securely.

Extend your security team’s capability with Microsoft Threat Experts—Our new managed threat-hunting service, called Microsoft Threat Experts, helps you proactively hunt and prioritize threats to get the most out of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). The service provides access to world-class experts who can help you work through tough investigation challenges with the new Ask a Threat Expert button. Go to your Windows Defender ATP settings to apply for the public preview.

Empower healthcare professionals to securely communicate and collaborate—This month, we announcednew capabilities in Microsoft Teams that enable secure messaging and collaboration workflows for healthcare organizations. Priority notifications enable clinicians to focus on urgent messages to manage patient care. In addition, the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams enables clinicians to securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and even start a video meeting—all in one hub for teamwork. These capabilities are now in private preview; visit the Microsoft 365 and health page and partner site to learn more about how Teams and Microsoft 365 can empower your healthcare teams.

Move confidently to the modern desktop and cloud with Desktop App Assureand Microsoft FastTrack—Our new service from Microsoft FastTrack, Desktop App Assure, provides app compatibility services for Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus. FastTrack also now offers guidance on how to configure Exchange Online Protection, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Message Encryption, and Data Loss Prevention policies. These services are now globally available to eligible customers with more than 150 seats at no additional cost. Sign in to Microsoft FastTrack and complete a Request for Assistance form to get started.

Get security alerts for your Microsoft account on your phone—Receive security notifications for important events on your personal Microsoft account now via the Microsoft Authenticator app. When you receive a push notification, you can quickly view your account activity and take actions to protect your account if needed. Microsoft Authenticator can also be used to add two-step verification to your account for added security. To get started, download the Microsoft Authenticator app and add your personal account.

Manage tasks and capture data with ease

New features expand capabilities to easily access all your apps and files, capture and convert data, and add context to your tasks.

Jump into your work quickly with the new Office app for Windows 10—The new, free Office app provides a simple experience to get started with and get the most out of Office. Anyone who signs in with a work, school, or personal Microsoft Account can use it to quickly access all the apps available to them and their most relevant files and documents. Organizations can also take advantage of the ability to integrate third-party apps, enable users to search for documents and people across the organization, and customize the experience with their own branding. The Office app can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store, requires a current version of Windows 10, and works with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, and Office.

Add data to Excel directly from a photo—Using the Excel app, you can take a picture of a printed data table on your Android device and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This new image recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter hardcopy data. This capability is starting to roll out for the Excel Android app with iOS support coming soon.

Quickly add photos and files to tasks inMicrosoft To-Do—Attach files and photos to help make tasks more actionable with added context. This highly requested feature is now available on all platforms and syncs across your devices, so you can take your new file-attached tasks on the go.

Other updates

New one-time passcodes (OTP) from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) make sharing and collaboration seamless for any user with any account.

Azure AD now supports automated user provisioning from Workday, enabling fast and efficient identity creation, so employees can access their Microsoft 365 apps and all other critical resources on day one.

Starting this month, the Teams desktop app will be installed along with the rest of the Office 365 ProPlus apps for all new installs.

Updates to the SharePoint Migration Tool make it even easier to bring your information to the cloud, with improvements like the ability to migrate web parts, pages, and site navigation.

Golf equipment manufacturer TaylorMade is shooting under par with its migration to Oracle’s cloud database.

TaylorMade Golf Company’s IT team had some decisions to make in 2017, when parent company Adidas sold it to a private equity firm. For one thing, the company had piggybacked on Oracle technology licenses held by Adidas.

Last year, TaylorMade negotiated a deal with Oracle for both on-premises database licenses and credits for Oracle’s Autonomous Cloud Database, where it moved its data warehouse from on-premises Oracle systems, said Tom Collard, VP of IT at TaylorMade, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif. That workload migration to the Oracle cloud database took just a few days, and from there a proof of concept (POC) went quickly. “Based on that, we said, ‘This feels like a no-brainer,'” he said.

Some reports run 40 times faster on the managed cloud service; exactly how this was achieved is unclear, Collard said. The increase is likely because the Oracle cloud database runs on up-to-date Exadata, compared to TaylorMade’s on-premises servers, which were about five years old.

Beyond speed improvements, the Oracle cloud database automatically tune itself, apply updates and patches and recover from failures, which it says frees up database administrators for other duties. TaylorMade’s database lead confirmed this during the POC, and the system has performed capably in production, Collard said.

TaylorMade’s decision to move its data warehouse to Oracle’s cloud also freed up space on the company’s on-premises hardware for other Oracle-dependent apps, including its E-Business Suite (EBS) ERP system. Collard and his team already felt uneasy that the infrastructure in place would not handle those workloads, and they anticipated growth after TaylorMade’s divestiture from Adidas would tax those core applications even more, he said.

An assessment showed that the data warehouse took up 40% of TaylorMade’s on-premises capacity, Collard said. Hence, the move onto Oracle’s cloud database both freed up plenty of space on premises, and averted the need for a large capital expenditure for more gear.

The business we’re in, we can’t be bleeding edge. … We have an investment in resources that are Oracle-literate.Tom CollardVP of IT, TaylorMade

TaylorMade’s data warehouse mainly pulls data from ERP processes to generate reports several times per day for the company’s sales and marketing teams, who analyze sales, inventory, operational data and distribution of TaylorMade’s products, Collard said. TaylorMade is a multichannel business that sells both direct to consumers via its e-commerce site and to wholesalers, which presents extra challenges with reporting and business intelligence, Collard said. “We have to take that data and normalize it,” he said. In addition, the near-real-time insights TaylorMade gets from its e-commerce channel helps it make better decisions with its wholesale strategy, he added.

TaylorMade also uses Oracle’s cloud for disaster recovery. Previously, it tapped AWS for this purpose, and still has some business with AWS for older projects and apps, Collard said. The company also works with Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics CRM.

While rivals such as AWS offer database migration services away from Oracle’s platform and onto their own, that was never a consideration for TaylorMade. “The business we’re in, we can’t be bleeding edge like that,” he said. “We have an investment in resources that are Oracle-literate.”

Nor does TaylorMade have current plans to move its Oracle ERP to the cloud. Oracle has had more commercial success with SaaS than with IaaS or PaaS, and last year rolled out a program called Soar to help enterprises rapidly implement enterprise apps on its cloud.

Complexities in TaylorMade’s ERP environment, mainly in the order-to-cash process, stand in the way of an imminent move to the cloud. However, it has adopted some peripheral Oracle cloud apps to help it close quarters and consolidate financials, Collard said.

“SaaS one day could replace our EBS environment, but we’ve got a little time to manage that,” he said.

Cloud database migration is key to Oracle’s future

Oracle wants more customers like TaylorMade to migrate database workloads to its cloud. While Oracle remains the market share leader in databases by a healthy margin, it is mindful of competitive risks from cloud-based alternatives –particularly those offered by the likes of AWS — as customers weigh whether to commit to Oracle long term or seek greener pastures.

Oracle has had the most cloud success to date in SaaS applications, while it lags far behind AWS, Azure and Google in IaaS market share. But Oracle’s long-term prospects still revolve around a successful transition of its on-premises database customers to the cloud. That’s because no matter the mode of deployment, databases are sticky by nature since they underpin so many crucial enterprise applications.

Active Member

I’m hunting for one for my other half and her photography business. Unlikely people will be moving these on just yet but thought I’d see.

Cheers

Location: Thame | Oxfordshire

______________________________________________________This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads.By replying to this thread you agree to abide by the trading rules detailed here.Please be advised, all buyers and sellers should satisfy themselves that the other party is genuine by providing the following via private conversation to each other after negotiations are complete and prior to dispatching goods and making payment:

Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too

Name and address including postcode

Valid e-mail address

DO NOT proceed with a deal until you are completely satisfied with all details being correct. It’s in your best interest to check out these details yourself.